The first in a sweeping, multi-volume history of Abraham Lincoln-from his obscure beginnings to his presidency, death, and the overthrow of his post-Civil War plan of reconciliation. From his youth as a voracious newspaper reader, Abraham Lincoln became a free thinker, reading Tom Paine, as well as Shakespeare and the Bible. In A Self-Made Man, Sidney Blumenthal reveals how Lincoln's antislavery thinking began in his childhood in backwoods Kentucky...